Marimo is Joining CoreWeave
I don't usually cover startup acquisitions here, but this one feels relevant to several of my interests.
Marimo (previously) provide an open source (Apache 2 licensed) notebook tool for Python, with first-class support for an additional WebAssembl...
My piece this morning about the Marimo acquisition is an example of a variant of a TIL - I didn't know much about CoreWeave, the acquiring company, so I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.
Marimo is Joining CoreWeave
I don't usually cover startup acquisitions here, but this one feels relevant to several of my interests.
Marimo (previously) provide an open source (Apache 2 licensed) notebook tool for Python, with first-class support for an additional WebAssembl...
To really understand a concept, you have to "invent" it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn't come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.
Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model
Here's the second fast coding model released by a coding agent IDE in the same day - the first was Composer-1 by Cursor. This time it's Windsurf releasing SWE-1.5:
Today we’re releasing SWE-1.5, the latest in our family of models op...
MiniMax M2 & Agent: Ingenious in Simplicity
MiniMax M2 was released on Monday 27th October by MiniMax, a Chinese AI lab founded in December 2021.
It's a very promising model. Their self-reported benchmark scores show it as comparable to Claude Sonnet 4, and Artificial An...
Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Cursor released Cursor 2.0 today, with a refreshed UI focused on agentic coding (and running agents in parallel) and a new model that's unique to Cursor called Composer 1.
As far as I can tell there's no way to call the m...
I'm at GitHub Universe this week (thanks to a free ticket from Microsoft). Yesterday I picked up my conference badge... which incorporates a full Raspberry Pi with a battery, color screen, WiFi and bluetooth.
GitHub Universe has a tradition of hackable conference badges - th...
Claude doesn't make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day.
It's the work that I don't know how to do and would have to research. Or the grunge work I don't even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on. Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn't have done at all pre-Claude.
The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Pytho...
GenAI Image Editing Showdown
Useful collection of examples by Shaun Pedicini who tested Seedream 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen-Image-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], FLUX.1 Kontext [max], OmniGen2, and OpenAI gpt-image-1 across 12 image editing prompts.
The tasks are very neatly sele...
Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands
Katie Notopoulos turned on the Sora 2 option where anyone can make a video featuring her cameo, and then:
I found a stranger had made a video where I appeared pregnant. A quick look at the user's profile, and I saw that this ...
Someone on Hacker News asked for tips on setting up a codebase to be more productive with AI coding tools. Here's my reply:
Good automated tests which the coding agent can run. I love pytest for this - one of my projects has 1500 tests and Claude Code is really good at sele...
Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding
New model interpretability research from Anthropic, this time focused on SVG and ASCII art generation.
We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also act...
claude_code_docs_map.md
Something I'm enjoying about Claude Code is that any time you ask it questions about itself it runs tool calls like these:
In this case I'd asked it about its "hooks" feature.
The claude_code_docs_map.md file is a neat Markdown index of all of their ...
A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!
Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon.
A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a supp...
Federal judge Ona T. Wang filed a new order on October 9 that frees OpenAI of an obligation to "preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis."
I wrote about this in June. OpenAI were compelled by a court order to preserve all output, even from private chats, in case it became relevant to the ongoing New York Times lawsuit.
Here are those "some exception":
The judge in the case said that any chat logs already saved under the previous order would still be accessible and that OpenAI is required to hold on to any data related to ChatGPT accounts that have been flagged by the NYT.
For resiliency, the DNS Enactor operates redundantly and fully independently in three different Availability Zones (AZs). [...] When the second Enactor (applying the newest plan) completed its endpoint updates, it then invoked the plan clean-up process, which identifies plan...
This afternoon I was manually converting a terminal session into a shared HTML file for the umpteenth time when I decided to reduce the friction by building a custom tool for it - and on the spur of the moment I fired up Descript to record the process. The result is this new...
My biggest complaint about the launch of the ChatGPT Atlas browser the other day was the lack of details on how OpenAI are addressing prompt injection attacks. The launch post mostly punted that question to the System Card for their "ChatGPT agent" browser automation feature...
I gave a talk last night at Claude Code Anonymous in San Francisco, the unofficial meetup for coding agent enthusiasts. I decided to talk about a dichotomy I've been struggling with recently. On the one hand I'm getting enormous value from running coding agents with as few r...
SLOCCount in WebAssembly
This project/side-quest got a little bit out of hand.
I remembered an old tool called SLOCCount which could count lines of code and produce an estimate for how much they would cost to develop. I thought it would be fun to play around with it again, ...
Claude Code stores full logs of your sessions as newline-delimited JSON in ~/.claude/projects/encoded-directory/*.jsonl on your machine. I currently have 379MB of these!
Unfortunately Claude Code has a nasty default behavior of deleting these after 30 days! You can't disable this entirely, but you can at least delay it for 274 years by adding this to your ~/.claude/settings.json file:
Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots: more vulnerabilities in Comet and other AI browsers
The Brave security team wrote about prompt injection against browser agents a few months ago (here are my notes on that). Here's their follow-up:
What we’ve found confirms our in...
Introducing ChatGPT Atlas
Last year OpenAI hired Chrome engineer Darin Fisher, which sparked speculation they might have their own browser in the pipeline. Today it arrived.
ChatGPT Atlas is a Mac-only web browser with a variety of ChatGPT-enabled features. You can bring up ...
Prompt injection might be unsolvable in today’s LLMs. LLMs process token sequences, but no mechanism exists to mark token privileges. Every solution proposed introduces new injection vectors: Delimiter? Attackers include delimiters. Instruction hierarchy? Attackers claim pr...
Since getting a modem at the start of the month, and hooking up to the Internet, I’ve spent about an hour every evening actually online (which I guess is costing me about £1 a night), and much of the days and early evenings fiddling about with things. It’s so complicated. All the hype never mentioned that. I guess journalists just have it all set up for them so they don’t have to worry too much about that side of things. It’s been a nightmare, but an enjoyable one, and in the end, satisfying.
— Phil Gyford, Diary entry, Friday February 17th 1995 1.50 am
Anthropic launched Claude Code for web this morning. It's an asynchronous coding agent - their answer to OpenAI's Codex Cloud and Google's Jules, and has a very similar shape. I had preview access over the weekend and I've already seen some very promising results from it.
It...
DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running on the NVIDIA Spark by having Claude Code effectively brute force the challenge of gettin...
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